High Speed Rail Affirmative 1ac – Energy Module (1/4)
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1AC – Energy Module (4/4)Warming causes extinction TICKELL 08 [Oliver Tickell, Climate Researcher, “On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/climatechange] We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction. The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die. Watson's call was supported by the government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, who warned that "if we get to a four-degree rise it is quite possible that we would begin to see a runaway increase". This is a remarkable understatement. The climate system is already experiencing significant feedbacks, notably the summer melting of the Arctic sea ice. The more the ice melts, the more sunshine is absorbed by the sea, and the more the Arctic warms. And as the Arctic warms, the release of billions of tonnes of methane – a greenhouse gas 70 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years – captured under melting permafrost is already under way. To see how far this process could go, look 55.5m years to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when a global temperature increase of 6C coincided with the release of about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, both as CO2 and as methane from bogs and seabed sediments. Lush subtropical forests grew in polar regions, and sea levels rose to 100m higher than today. It appears that an initial warming pulse triggered other warming processes. Many scientists warn that this historical event may be analogous to the present: the warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth. 1AC – Economy Module (1/6)Advantage Two: All Your Spending Disad Belong To Us The current economic crisis has nothing to do with budget or monetary concerns. Only deep infrastructural reforms can adapt the U.S. to the knowledge economy and spur recovery Florida 2010 [Richard, Senior Editor at The Atlantic, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, previously held professorships at George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University and taught as a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT, holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, “The Roadmap to a High-Speed Recovery,” The New Republic, August 12th, Available Online at http://www.tnr.com/print/article/economy/76961/richard-florida-reset-recovery-economy-future, Accessed 06-10-2012] But now we find ourselves having the wrong debate—about whether a stimulus is needed or not—and we need to shift it. The fiscal and monetary fixes that have helped mature industrial economies like the United States get back on their feet since the Great Depression are not going to make the difference this time. Mortgage interest tax credits and massive highway investments are artifacts of our outmoded industrial age; in fact, our whole housing-auto complex is superannuated. As University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan wrote recently in the Financial Times: “The bottom line in the current jobless recovery suggests the US has to take deep structural reforms to improve its supply side. The quality of its financial sector, its physical infrastructure, as well as its human capital, all need serious economic and politically difficult upgrades.” Now we’re getting to the nub of the matter. Why? Because this is no bump in the business cycle that we are going through; it is an epochal event, comparable in magnitude and scope to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even more so, as historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has observed, to the decades-long crisis that began in 1873. Back then our economy was undergoing a fundamental shift from agriculture to industry. We are in the midst of an equally tectonic transition today, as our industrial economy gives way to a post-industrial knowledge economy—but by focusing all our attention on whether we need a bigger stimulus or a smaller deficit, we’re flying blind. These kind of epochal changes, which I have called “great resets,” are long, generational processes. They are driven by improvements in efficiency and productivity, and by the waves of innovation that Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” When economies slow down, inefficient companies go by the boards. Seeking better returns on investment, businesses redirect capital towards innovation. When the economist Alfred Kleinknecht diagrammed U.S. patents along a timeline extending through the nineteenth century, he found a huge spike in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, a period of depression that also saw the invention of electric power, modern telephony, and street and cable car systems. The economic historian Alexander Field observed a similar clustering and unleashing of innovation in the 1930s, which he dubbed the most “technologically progressive decade” of the twentieth century. More R&D labs opened in the first four years of the Great Depression than in the entire preceding decade, 73 compared to 66. By 1940, the number of people employed in R&D had quadrupled, increasing from fewer than 7,000 in 1929 to nearly 28,000 by 1940, according to the detailed historical research of David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg. Our transition from a Fordist mass production economy, based on the assembly line, to a knowledge economy, in which the driving force is creativity and technological innovation, has been under way for some time; the evidence can be seen in the physical decline of the old manufacturing cities and the boom in high-tech centers like Silicon Valley, government boomtowns like Washington DC, and college towns from Boulder to Ann Arbor. Between 1980 and 2006, the U.S. economy added some 20 million new jobs in its creative, professional, and knowledge sectors. Even today, unemployment in this sector of the economy has remained relatively low, and according to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, is likely to add another seven million jobs in the next decade. By contrast, the manufacturing sector added only one million jobs from 1980 to 2006, and, according to the BLS, will lose 1.2 million by 2020. This is the future towards which our post-industrial economy is already trending—and government should be proposing policies that will help to create a new geography and a new way of life to sustain and support it. But that doesn’t mean we need a centralized public bureaucracy to speed the process of change. As it happens, innovation occurs not only within big companies, major laboratories, and research universities, but also on the margins of business and academia. John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s storied Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), has observed that many, if not most, of today’s high-tech innovations are products of the open-ended, collaborative explorations of hackers. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the PC; he saw its components at work at PARC, realized their potential, and put the pieces together. 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